Ciudades (Jun 2009)
La naturaleza artificial de Central Park
Abstract
Central Park was the first American public park, pioneer in the adaptation of an European model following the style of picturesque and English gardening, the result of a group of transformations that intensified the landscape effects: over the ground there was a designed and drawn territory copying the nature and below it an efficient technologic system. The park gathers the skills of two kinds of non-built sites in the city: the image or recreation of nature in the urban reality and the potentiality of a place without occupation, a paradigm of the identification of a social and democratic use of leisure time. This space reserved in the middle of a rural landscape when the city was just an abstract prevision grip-shaped and that place only an useless mixture of swamps and rocks, was transformed as in the project of two founders of landscape architecture; today has become a relevant territory free of construction towards the compact city where is contained, a unique example of juxtaposition of nature and city.
